APT - Schizophrenia Lesson

 

Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia may be the most severely debilitating of all the common psychological disorders. People with schizophrenia experience:

• disorganized and delusional thinking
• disorganized speech
• hallucinations
• inappropriate emotions and actions

Obviously, these characteristics would meet the qualifications of distress, deviance, and dysfunction.  

The thought processes of a person with schizophrenia are irrational and disorganized. Schizophrenic people typically cannot maintain a continuous thought process long enough to complete more than one logical sentence. They may speak in random, disconnected fragments instead of complete thoughts. It is also common for a schizophrenic person to suffer from delusions - distorted false beliefs. These might be delusions of persecution (believing that people are out to get them) or delusions of grandeur (believing that they are someone famous, heroic, or historic).

Hallucinations (sensory experiences without sensory input) are also common in schizophrenic patients. They may see, hear, smell, taste, or feel things that are not actually there, and be unable to tell the difference between real sensations and the hallucinatory ones. In laboratory tests, patients who are experiencing auditory hallucinations (hearing voices) show temporal lobe activation exactly as they would when hearing real voices; for them, the voices are just as real as real voices.

The emotional experience of a person with schizophrenia is often extreme, with inappropriate reactions. The person might show no emotion, even in the face of a family member's death, or might laugh instead of crying.

Schizophrenic individuals, with their fragmented thoughts and inappropriate emotions, find it difficult to engage in relationships and a career. The disorder can develop gradually through the teen years and into the twenties, or occur suddenly and severely at once.

Complete the schizophrenia review activity below:

 

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